Any Given Sunday
A sink full of dishes
Photo by Drew Fralick on an iPhone 6
He got that ambition, baby, look at his eyes
This week he moppin' floors, next week it's the fries
- Kayne West on man’s search for meaning.
I can’t prove it, but I’m starting to feel like the NFL is scripted. Maybe not fully rigged, but allowed to follow a loosely written outline towards an inevitable outcome geared to get as many eyeballs on the television as possible.
Surely, it can’t be real life? The same tired storylines, the same overaged stars, the same large market teams being forced down our throat like Mussolini’s henchmen serving castor oil to their victims.
There is no real element of surprise in the NFL, no flavor of life’s seemingly random arc. Those real surprises are instead found in daily life’s mundane details – a bad night’s sleep, an encouraging word from a family member, a decision to eat less sodium.
The NFL seems to be immune to real life. There are the favored sons of the league and then there are the fodder that will be fed to them. Like a Bond movie – no matter how old or beaten up Bond seems to get, the henchmen he kills fall over like cardboard cutouts.
Every Thursday, Sunday and Monday, they crank up the hype machine to maximum volume, coming at you with dazzling light after dazzling light, trying to convince you how special what you’re about to watch is gonna be.
The teams rush through their tunnels, decked in gladiatorial garb: smoke machines roar! fireworks explode! Emotional eyes tear up during the national anthem, hearts burst for America, arteries burst from Taco Bell’s new Cheesy Gordita Crunch Combo.
It’s a bread and circus, a narcotically potent distraction to keep me from looking at what’s right in front of me – which at this particular moment is a sink full of dishes.
***
Please decide what it is I’m looking at NFL. Pick a direction television! These rapidly cycling images are giving me emotional whiplash.
One moment shots of terrifically fit human beings, performing near herculean tasks: hitting, running, catching, throwing. All that activity looks exhausting. Just watching them run makes me hungry.
The shot quickly cuts to the part of the broadcast meant for me: ads for WendysTacoBellBurgerking. Melting cheddar cheese, sizzling bacon, frothy beer (with less calories!).
You show me these hyperfit humans and then tell me to go slam a cheeseburger. At some point, I’ll end up looking like a cheeseburger.
Somewhere deep inside, my mind registers my increasingly cheeseburger-like appearance.
Cut scene back to images of cheerleaders and smiling men, forty-five year olds that don’t like a day over thirty. More images: biceps and impossible touchdown receptions, announcers whose faces are held together with Botox, duct tape, and gin.
The announcers are telling me what I just watched, as if I didn’t just watch it. They’re telling me what to look for in the upcoming segment. These people really don’t respect our intelligence.
Take a quick commercial break and we’ll be right back they say, as if the commercials aren’t the main course and the football a seasoning salt to help us gag down the meal.
Here come the cheeseburgers again, beef, bacon, cheddar, chili. Now a short scene of twenty somethings rock climbing in the Andes and stopping to enjoy a frothy beer at the summit (with less calories!). The scene looks amazing, maybe I’ll take a rock-climbing vacation one of these days.
But not now, I’m busy watching my commercials.
They hammer you with these fast food commercials, the ads coming one right after another like body shots early in a fight. They’ll even deliver the food to your door. My subconscious registers the growing distance between my body and those on the screen. A faint anxiety washes over my mind.
Just in time they rush in with the solution! They poison me to death then sell me the cure. Fear that cheeseburger bod no more, for what can fix it all is a Peloton, a Nordic Track, a Gatorade, some Under Armour. Thin models with breathtakingly low BMIs ride bikes, pouring sweat, surely you can do the same. Gold medalist Olympians swig sports drinks, flip giant tires, shout incoherent phrases at you. It’s like you’re practically in the huddle at midfield:
“The only way is through!!! Gaaarrgh!!!”
“Gaaarrgh!!! We must PROTECT THIS HOUSE!!!”
However, what your house really needs is not protection, but a thorough cleaning. Remember those dishes this circus was supposed to blissfully carry you away from? They’re still there, waiting for you to scrub dish soap on them and gently place them in the drying rack.
***
The dishes need to be washed, and tomorrow when they’re dirty, they’ll need to be washed again. There’s nothing glamorous about what I do.
But this allegedly Sisyphean struggle may have a surprise ending after all. Rather than our souls slowly turning into Jabba the Hutt, we learn to take a thousand boring steps towards the place we want to go.
Football is good. Bud Light with Lime is good. Baconators are good.
The cost of distraction aggregated over a month, a year, a lifetime – is devastating.